I am peeking out from my stack of books to wish you all a happy 2012. The holidays are over, and now it’s nearly time to get back to work. Of course, I have been at work, hard at work on a new book. It’s extremely exciting stuff and I’m kind of twitter-pated about the thing. I think it’ll be tremendously useful when it’s done, and it’s sure to annoy all sorts of people in the magical community — annoy them productively, I hope, because it’s about a branch of magic that has been all but ignored in modern ceremonial and pagan magical traditions: theurgy.

The best part about being an occult author is that each book acts as an incentive to learn. You have to pull together what you know, revisit old experiments you haven’t done in years, try new things you’ve never done so you can write about them, and so on. Right now I’m busy memorizing barbarous words of evocation from a spell in the PGM (yes, you have to memorize them — sorry, but it’s where I get strict. Others harp on visual evocation, but for me, it’s this: you have to memorize. The notecard is not a magical tool). Even the act of preparing for some of these rituals is powerful.

Of course, because I’m committed to banging out 1000 to 2000 words every single day, on top of all my other work as my winter vacation ends, I don’t have much time to blog. But I’ll try to keep a bit more active now that the holidays are over.